-
Skepticism
I have always been a skeptical person. I don’t believe in ghosts or any supernatural beings. I believe in science, and critical thinking. I first discovered the skeptic community back in 2005 when I discovered the Skepticality podcast. Nowadays I read a lot of skeptic blogs, and listen to a lot of skeptic podcasts. I have learned so much in the last four years thanks to the skeptic community. The more that I learn to think critically, the more I learn to spot all the misinformation being spread about many topics; From the Moon hoaxers, to the 911 truthers, to the antivax crowd, and all the “alternative medicine” quacks. There is a lot of nonsense out there. Critically thinking needs to be taught more in high schools. Learning how to think really should be a top priority in schools.
One of my favorite person in the skeptical community is the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait. He has a great blog, is the President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and an excellent speaker. I have watched many of his talks online and they all are incredible. This past summer he was a speaker at Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex and did a great talk about skepticism. You can watch it below:
-
Palindromes
I love running across palindromes, but I can never remember them. In case you don’t know, a palindrome is a word or phrase that can be read the same forwards and backwards. I always thought the name palindrome should be a palindrome, but it’s not. The two that I always remember are “race car” and “race fast, safe car”. Chris Pirillo recently blogged about his favorite palindrome and asked for everybody’s favorites. Some of them are pretty amazing, but I think Weird Al has some of the best I have ever heard in this video.
Then there is the 224 word palindrome written by Demetri Martin (who is one funny comedian I might add) titled “Dammit I’m Mad“. Amazing stuff.
-
New Theme
It seems like I am changing my blog template more often than my underwear. For my last template I wanted something simple, and something that brought all my social network posts together. Shortly after I released that one, Chris Pirillo came out with his WicketPixie theme. It is pretty cool because you can enter all your social network links and it will automatically get the favicon and integrate them into your blog. You can visit my “social activity” page and see all my social network activity. I still have some CSS tweaking to do. I ran out of time last night, and wont have much time to play with it for a while now.